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Friday, June 5, 2009

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally achieved the first "cold ironing" of a tanker in the Port of Long Beach. Cold Ironing is the term for plugging a ship's electrical system into the on-shore grid to supply power so that the ship's giant diesel engine can be turned off while it's docked. Normally, these engines crank out massive amounts of pollution, equal to "a day's worth of driving by 187,000 cars", according to estimates by the Port of Long Beach.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) initiated suits against the ports over 7 years ago to make this happen, and it was a long difficult fight, but the NRDC's attorneys persevered and eventually won. This event marks the first of what we hope will be the electrification of all the tanker and cargo ships while docked in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. For too long, the people living downwind of the ports have suffered the ill effects of this pollution with heart and lung disease, cancers and asthma rates that are significantly higher than average.

An earlier post of mine highlighted the hybridization of the tugboats that guide these massive ships into berth, further extending the benefits of electrifying what had been exclusively internal combustion-powered vehicles. Every kilowatt hour used to replace the burning of petroleum helps us to clean our environment, saves us money and reduces the need to fight wars over oil.

Port of Long Beach takes 'giant step' toward pollution reduction

Port officials unveil what is billed as the world's first electrical shore-side power system for tankers, which are notorious fuel guzzlers and air polluters.

By Ronald D. White June 4, 2009

Docked in Long Beach on Wednesday with a fresh load of oil from Valdez, the Alaskan Navigator didn't look like much of a trailblazer.

The massive tanker sat silently, with a few thin cables draping down to some gray metal boxes. Missing was the incessant rumble of diesel engines, which on an average cargo ship would be running constantly to keep electrical systems going -- burning quite a bit of diesel fuel and generating a significant amount of pollution.But the 941-foot Navigator, anchored at the BP oil terminal's Pier T on the Long Beach port's main channel, isn't average. The vessel, owned by Alaska Tanker Co. of Portland, Ore., was plugged into what is billed as the world's first shore-side electrical grid.

Only the Navigator's sister ship, the Frontier, is similarly equipped. Oil tankers are notorious fuel guzzlers and air polluters because of the power that's needed to pump vast amounts of crude out of a ship. It's the rough energy equivalent of a day's worth of driving by 187,000 cars, according to the Port of Long Beach.

At a ceremony formally unveiling the port's dockside power system, port Executive Director Dick Steinke described it as "another giant step" toward cleaning up the air.

The project cost $23.7 million and took three years to complete, port officials said. The port contributed about $17.5 million to the project and BP paid the rest.

Roger Brown, regional vice president of BP, said the emissions reductions amounted to 50% even when factoring in pollution created by power plants in generating the electricity.

A friend turned me on to this article on connecting school lunch programs with local farms. What a concept? Better nutrition and supporting local farms which decreases food miles as well as helping to bolster the local economy.

Check it out.

Dave

Farm to School Programs: a lesson in win-win relationships

This September the federal Child Nutrition bills which cover the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, will be up for evaluation and amendment during the reauthorization process. This window of opportunity arises every five years for lawmakers to improve upon child nutrition programs. The nation’s burgeoning childhood obesity epidemic is forcing health leaders and politicians alike to prioritize childhood nutrition. This is an opportune time to position school food as a key factor in improving health and nutrition of American children who, on average, receive 35 to 40 percent of their daily calories from school meals.

School food services are fighting a difficult battle to provide healthy food today, due to rising costs, tight budgets and competition from fast food chains. Major changes are crucial, and this is why farm to school (FTS) programs, supported by the National Farm to School network are a vital part of improving the current situation. Furthermore, they are sustainable.

FTS programs help schools procure seasonal produce and other food from local farmers. In addition to getting better quality food into schools, the programs help support local economies by supporting family farms across the country.

Currently children in over 2,000 school districts in 40 states are benefiting from farm to school programs, which have resulted in greater consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables and numerous other positive outcomes outlined in the publication Nourishing the Nation One Tray at a Time. The National Farm to School Program was established in 2004 as part of the Child Nutrition Act reauthorization. Although the program was authorized, the funds for it were never appropriated and efforts to date have been privately funded. A reliable stream of public funding is essential to ensure the growth and success of FTS programs across the country.

New York City schools recently signed a $4 million contract to receive apples from upstate New York farms. In Colorado, local grass-fed beef is used in tacos in some school districts. A cost-analysis for Colorado’s Missoula County Public School District found that buying local seasonal produce was either less expensive or comparable in price to purchasing similar items from wholesale suppliers. Creative grassroots FTS programs are popping up all over, increasing the quality of school food while supporting the livelihood of farmers.

On May 15th, the National School to Farm Network and other school health and nutrition experts presented at a special hearing on the “Benefits of Farm to School Projects, Healthy Eating and Physical Activity for School Children,” convened by the United States Senate’s Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee in Atlanta, GA. Those in attendance included Senators Tom Harkin (D-Ia) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), and representatives from theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Department of Agriculture. Glyen Holmes, of the New North Florida Cooperative Association and the South Regional Lead Agency Coordinator for the National Farm to School Network testified, “Every child deserves the opportunity to eat food in school that ensures their health and well-being, and Farm to School programs are one solution to incorporating healthier foods into school meals.” He called funding farm to school programs a top priority in the efforts needed to improve child nutrition in the United States.

In addition to allocating necessary funding to FTS programs, the network recommends amendments to ensure that the benefits of FTS reach all children, including increasing reimbursement rates for all child nutrition programs, improving standards for school meals, encouraging procurement of local produce, and an educational component focused on agriculture and food.

So what is the first step in getting a program going in your community? “Passion and interest is all it takes to start a farm to school program,” explained Debra Eschmeyer, Program Media & Marketing Director of the Farm to School Network. Free tools and resources, including a communications guide, surveys, downloadable curricula and brochures, and valuable information about existing state and county school programs are readily available to get your own local program off the ground. The Farm to School Network, its eight regional offices, and partnering organizations are invaluable resources for both start-up and existing programs. The excitement of FTS lies in the grassroots approach, which involves a wide variety of community stakeholders in creating programs that meet the needs of students and schools, while tapping into the resources of local agriculture. It truly is a win-win relationship.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

This is a pretty good post from Edmunds.com about an article in Energy and Environmental Science on the dangers of cellulosic ethanol as an answer to our energy needs. I've often felt that biofuels are not a long term solution (although in reality I don't think there will be a silver bullet solution but a hodge podge of different ones) and the findings in this study are interesting to see. According to the study, wind powered battery electric vehicles are the least environmentally damaging solution to our transportation needs. Interesting reading and worth checking out.

Dave

Cellulosic ethanol, which people from President-elect Barack Obama to struggling farmers from his home state view a promising biofuel, is actually worse than much-criticized corn ethanol because cellulosic ethanol results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more harm to wildlife, a major study has found.

The energy alternatives "that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful," said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, in a paper that reviewed and ranked major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air-pollution mortality and energy security.

"Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels," he said, adding that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.

Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed major energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability.

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order: wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric.

Jacobson, who is also director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford, recommended against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol made from prairie grass. Granted, cellulosic ethanol can be made from other sources and those were not studied.

To place the various alternatives on an equal footing, Jacobson first made his comparisons among the energy sources by calculating the impacts as if each alternative alone were used to power all the vehicles in the U.S., assuming only "new-technology" vehicles were being used.

Wind was by far the most promising, Jacobson said, owing to a better-than 99 percent reduction in carbon and air pollution emissions; the consumption of less than 3 square kilometers of land for the turbine footprints to run the entire U.S. vehicle fleet (given the fleet is composed of battery-electric vehicles); the saving of about 15,000 lives per year from premature air-pollution-related deaths from vehicle exhaust in the U.S.; and virtually no water consumption.

The Least Promising

By contrast, corn and cellulosic ethanol will continue to cause more than 15,000 air pollution-related deaths in the country per year, Jacobson asserted.

Because the wind turbines would require a modest amount of spacing between them to allow room for the blades to spin, wind farms would occupy about 0.5 percent of all U.S. land, but this amount is more than 30 times less than that required for growing corn or grasses for ethanol. Land between turbines on wind farms would be simultaneously available as farmland or pasture or could be left as open space.

Indeed, a battery-powered U.S. vehicle fleet could be charged by 73,000 to 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines -- fewer than the 300,000 airplanes the U.S. produced during World War II and far easier to build. Additional turbines could provide electricity for other energy needs.

"There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession," Jacobson said. "Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power."

Jacobson said that while some people are under the impression that wind and wave power are too variable to provide steady amounts of electricity, his research group has already shown in previous research that by properly coordinating the energy output from wind farms in different locations, the potential problem with variability can be overcome and a steady supply of baseline power delivered to users.

The Most Damaging

He described biofuels as "the most damaging choice we could make in our efforts to move away from using fossil fuels." He said the money going into biofuels would be better spent promoting energy technologies that cause significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and air-pollution mortality, "not technologies that have either marginal benefits or no benefits at all."

During the recent presidential campaign, nuclear power and "clean coal" were often touted as energy solutions that should be pursued, but nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration were Jacobson's lowest-ranked choices after biofuels.

"Coal with carbon sequestration emits 60- to 110-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy, and nuclear emits about 25-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy," Jacobson said. Although carbon-capture equipment reduces 85 percent to 90 percent of the carbon exhaust from a coal-fired power plant, it has no impact on the carbon resulting from the mining or transport of the coal or on the exhaust of other air pollutants.

In fact, because carbon capture requires a roughly 25-percent increase in energy from the coal plant, about 25 percent more coal is needed, increasing mountaintop removal and increasing non-carbon air pollution from power plants, he said.

Nuclear power poses other risks. Jacobson said it is likely that if the U.S. were to move more heavily into nuclear power, then other nations would demand to be able to use that option.

"Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it's straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do," Jacobson said. "The potential for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon or for states to develop nuclear weapons that could be used in limited regional wars will certainly increase with an increase in the number of nuclear energy facilities worldwide."

"Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,900 times the price of tap water, consumers are clearly led to believe that they are buying a product that has been purified to a level beyond the water that comes out of the garden hose.

To the contrary, our tests strongly indicate that the purity of bottled water cannot be trusted. Given the industry's refusal to make available data to support their claims of superiority, consumer confidence in the purity of bottled water is simply not justified."

Someone sent me this link where my blog is part of a best local blogs contest. I never really thought of it as being local, but I guess it is on some level since I live in LA. Anyway, if you feel so compelled, please drop in and drop me a vote.

Tetra Pak is a 60-year-old Swiss packaging and food processing company. It's likely that Tetra Pak wrapped up many of the products sitting in your kitchen cupboards right now. One of its flagship packaging products is the rugged, paper-based cartons that are widely used for selling soy milk, soups and other liquid food and beverages. Last week I participated in a twitter conference that Tetra Pak hosted in order to spread a message of sustainability around this packaging type, also called aseptic paper packaging.I should add that after I signed up to participate in the twittercon, TetraPak sent me two sample products packaged in the aseptic Tetra Pak: a bottle (or rather, carton) of wine and a carton of chicken broth. (I'm a vegetarian, so I'm looking for a home for the chicken broth. I also think they could have sent a product that is less energy-intensive than chicken broth. But I digress.)

Along with this product, the company sent along some printed information about these Tetra Pak cartons. They are made of 74 percent paper. They are lightweight and make up a smaller packaging-to-product ratio than other packaging forms. On other words, glass and plastic weigh more, which means they require more energy to transport. The square dimension of the cartons make them efficient in terms of load space—you can often load more cartons on a pallet than cans and bottles, for example.

And then there's the wow factor: Tetra Pak packaging is shelf-stable, meaning the products (yep, milk) do not need to be refrigerated until the air-tight packaging is opened. So this means perishable items such as milk can be stored for more than a year without refrigeration, and that a lot less energy required for storage.

All in all, Tetra Pak figures that its packaging has a smaller carbon footprint than polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high density polyethylene (HDPE) or glass. A 32-ounce beverage container made by Tetra Pak represents 126 kg of CO2, while glass packaging for the same size drink represents 238 kg CO2, according to the company (and backed up, it says, by third party tests).

Great. So far, so sustainable. But the end of a Tetra Pak's life isn't always very green. The blame here doesn’t totally hang on Tetra Pak, however.

First off, I was a bit surprised to even learn that the aseptic packaging can be recycled, since it is comprised of three materials—74 percent paper, with aluminum (the liner) and low density polyethylene film (the lid) accounting for the rest. Recycling packaging that is comprised of multiple materials is often harder and more expensive than recycling pure stock. For this reason, as I have often been told by folks in the packaging industry, mixed materials are sometimes not recyclable.

In fact, I can't recycle Tetra Pak cartons here in lovely, "green" San Francisco. That doesn't mean they are not recyclable. It means that for various economic or infrastructure-based reasons, San Francisco has chosen not to collect the material for recycling.

Tetra Pak's aseptic paper packaging is collected for recycling in many California communities—and in towns and cities in 25 other states across the country. I asked Tetra Pak what it would take to get more municipalities to recycle the cartons. I've not yet received an answer. I also asked what percentage of the 22 billion Tetra Pak cartons that are sold annually are collected and recycled, and how many are land-filled. The Tetra Pak reps on the twittercon said they didn't have that data at hand. That's a shame. And it's also odd; seems like the kind of info they should have had at hand for a conference on sustainability.

Now, unlike glass, old Tetra Pak cartons do not get recycled into new Tetra Pak cartons. When material is recycled, its three constituents are separated. The paper is reused in different paper and tissue products and the aluminum and PE are used either for fuel stock or are recycled into other types of products. There are hundreds of plants around the world that recycle the packaging.

In some parts of the world, recycling rates for aseptic paper are high. This is especially true in parts of Europe, where government mandates comprehensive recycling. The United States does not have that kind of regulation. So does that mean that Tetra Pak's cartons are less sustainable here than they are in other parts of the world? Perhaps.

But more important is that major cities in the United States aren't recycling their share of the 22 billion Tetra Paks that their citizens consume each year. What are the barriers to making Tetra Pak recycling more widely available?

I'll try to find answers to that question in part two of this carton confab series. In the meantime, chime in with your own opinions.

I try to keep politics out of this blog as much as I can but i really can't overlook this one. I'm the first to say that there are things I don't agree with about Michael Moore, but when he's right, he's right. Check out his ideas for what we, the new owners of GM, should be doing with our new company now that they've filed for bankruptcy protection.

Dave

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Goodbye, GM

by Michael Moore

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.

So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

The "Why Should I" series for kids includes books on Nature, Energy and Water as well as Recycling. This is a great (and affordable) series of books that will introduce your kids to the concepts that are going to make their futures more liveable. We at SustainableDave feel that educating children is a huge part of tackling the problems that we face and the "Why Should I" series is a great way to start the process.